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awareness, probes originally designed to make contact with the Harvesters, a highly advanced electronic intelligence occupying the high-energy environment around the star Deneb.

Gray remembered that time spent as a super-intellect, as a Mind of godlike scope and power. The memory, faded like a dream,still lingered . . . and it scared the hell out of him.

But it wasn’t without precedent. Back on Earth, the same principle had been applied to the Global Net, the modern iterationof what once had been called the Internet. Rather than merely using the new infrastructure for mind-to-mind communications,the entire mind could enter the Net, surfing its crests and troughs, exploring a staggeringly rich virtual environment, andmerging with other minds in what had become known as the Godstream.

The Godstream on and near Earth didn’t scare Gray. If something went wrong, the connection was lost and you woke up back inyour chair at home. But what Truitt was proposing was a Net with a baseline many light-minutes across. If you got kicked offof that monster, you might well not wake up back home.

You might well not wake up at all.

“What do we need, Konstantin?” Gray asked at last.

“We need to create a large number of modified Bright Light modules,” the SAI replied. “I anticipated your agreeing to theplan and took the liberty of beginning to nanufacture them based on plans stored within America’s RAM. You should call for volunteers within the crew and coordinate with the other ships as well. We will need all of our resources and assets to carry this off.”

“And the implementation? The logistics?”

“I shall plot the necessary courses for the placement of each module. That part will be time-consuming, but careful positioning of all modules will maximize our chances of detecting the Sh’daar.”

Gray hesitated, then nodded. “Do it.”

“Admiral?” Mackey’s voice said in his head. “Excuse the interruption. We have entered Alcubierre space again. Five minutesat two lights.”

“Very well.” Gray disengaged from the link with Konstantin and opened his eyes. The CIC external view screens showed a sterileblackness, the emptiness that was America’s own private universe as she folded space around herself in a tight little bubble.

Bright Light modules. Did they offer the squadron a chance? He felt as though it were a long shot . . . some tens of thousandsof light years.

At this point, though, long shot might be the best odds they had.

 

USNA CVS America

Flight Deck Storage Locker

N’gai Cluster

1745 hours, FST

“My God!” Gregory said, his voice close to trembling. “I thought you were dead!”

He held Julianne Adams close, the two of them floating, clinging to one another in microgravity, but constrained somewhatby the narrow storage space just off the carrier’s flight deck. Holding her head between his hands, he kissed her, deeplyand hungrily.

“Mmm,” she said after a long moment. “Maybe I should get captured by Russians more often.”

She said it lightly enough, but he could hear the ragged edge to her voice.

“Are you okay?” he asked her, worried. “Did they . . . are you? . . .”

“I’m fine, Don,” she told him. “I’m okay. A bit shaky, maybe. Just . . . just hold me.”

He did, pulling her closer.

“I heard you’d been found,” he whispered into her hair. “But they took you straight to sick bay and wouldn’t let me in tosee you.”

“The . . . the Russians hit me with an injectable nano. It had me way off-kilter. But the med people gave me a counter-nano,something to clear out the bad stuff.”

“And your implants?”

“The docs told me they checked out okay.” She made a face. “God, I thought I was going to have to grow new hardware, though.I felt so dirty. . . .”

“I know—”

“You can’t know! I’m sorry, it’s just—I can’t have them in my head! That was the worst part.”

“It’s over now.”

“It’s . . . it’s not over,” she told him. “Not yet. But this helps. I just need you to hold me,” she said, quietly sobbingnow.

“My God, what did they do to you?”

Tears danced around her face, tiny, glittering spheres adrift in microgravity.

He held her, whispering to her that everything, everything would be okay.

 

USNA CVS America

Flag Bridge

N’gai Cluster

2235 hours, FST

“First dozen drones away, Admiral,” Mackey told him. “We have signal.”

“Very well, Mack,” Gray replied. He glanced at Lieutenant West. “Okay, Wild West,” he said. He didn’t usually address juniorofficers by their handles, but he was feeling more optimistic than he’d felt in some time. They’d beaten the Russians and a pack of Nungiirtok, they were on the trail of their quarry, and most important, they now had a definite plan of attack.“How are the others doing?”

“We haven’t heard from the Birmingham yet, Admiral,” she replied. “Speed of light time lag. Acadia and Arlington both report ready for deployment, as soon as they have their drones on board.”

“Keep me informed.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral.”

The nanufactories on Acadia had been working all out, turning rawmat into the modified Bright Light modules Mackey was calling “drones.” Konstantin hadbeen programming those drones as they came off the assembler lines, and the first twelve had just been launched from Acadia’s flight bay. Bundles of some hundreds of drones had already been packed aboard interfleet transports and were on their wayto Birmingham and Arlington, which would soon disperse across a huge volume of space to plant them. The fleet had spent several hours repositioning itselfnearly two light years from the N’gai galactic center, an area that Konstantin had decided was statistically more likely thanothers to actually be concealing the big Sh’daar slow-movers, the artificial worlds and rings and terraformed cylinders. Whereverin all of this emptiness they now were, the human fleet ought to be able to pick them up with their improvised Godstream net.

Behind them, a bright star burned in a thick, white haze—the hypernova. They were seeing its light now as it was two yearsago at one year old and in that time it had faded quite a bit, but there still was glare enough from seven detonating sunsto fill the dwarf galaxy’s core with radiance.

That was another advantage of moving the search out here. The orbiting Six Suns Rosette generated gravity waves, very powerfulgravity waves, but the disturbance was considerably dampened by distance.